(357f) Conceptual Design of Bionic Reactor

The conventional fixed-bed reactor has the weakness that the pressure drop is big and the activity of the catalyst is limited by the internal diffusion. Inspired by the mammalian blood circulatory system, the new concept of bionic reactor was proposed. The bionic reactor contained a distributed feeding channel network (arterial system), a distributed discharging channel network (venous system) and a catalyst packed bed (tissue). A series of high-resolution CFD simulations and optimizations were implemented to investigate the characteristic of the bionic reactor. Compared with conventional fixed-bed reactor, flow resistance was greatly reduced by using bionic configuration under the same residence time. The back-mixing was apparently lowered in optimal bionic networks. Strong robustness was verified for reactor with bionic network configuration, which would effectively reduce worse effects induced by uncertain factors such as short circuit or blocking in channel network. The bionic reactor can be used in the fast catalytic reactions such as catalytic reforming, methanol synthesis.